


Dear, Have You Ever Understood?

by Lauralot



Series: I But A Shell of Myself [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Attempted Murder, Blood and Gore, Eating Disorders, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Past Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-02 02:12:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4041775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauralot/pseuds/Lauralot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is his friend.</p><p>Steve is everything wrong with the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dear, Have You Ever Understood?

Steve wears bandages wrapped tight around his left hand, cocooning the wound so that new, pink flesh can emerge where now there’s only blood and darkness and blank space, where the Soldier gave him the knife. He doesn’t wear the knife there now. It doesn’t matter; the Soldier’s sure that Steve keeps it somewhere, cherished, black and shiny and so sharp. It’s a good knife, barely a press and blood comes cascading down a throat, flesh peels back like the ribbons that used to go around the pretty boxes in the wintertime, a flick of the wrists and tendons go _snickt_ and the body just crumples like the paper on the boxes—

The Soldier doesn’t have any knives in the tower.

Sometimes when Steve moves his hand, red soaks into the white of the bandages. Cardinals in the snow. The Soldier likes to hold his hand then, likes to feel the heat and the soft cloth, so different from how ordinary wounds are treated, with sutures and staples and ice. Steve is special. His wounds are special, and sometimes the Soldier tries to unwind the bandages so he can see the hole beneath and know it’s really Steve. So he can taste Steve’s blood, his life, so he can stick his fingers in the wound and remember, be sure of how he helped.

But Steve will put his other hand on the Soldier’s when the Soldier tugs on the bandages, giving him a frowning smile. “It’s okay, Bucky,” he’ll say. “It doesn’t hurt.”

The Soldier smiles back. It doesn’t hurt. He helped Steve get free. Steve is his friend even though he knows that the Soldier is not Bucky Barnes, even though he knows that Barnes was weak and stained and stupid. Steve can see through him, look past his armor and clothing and study his insides, pick just the right words to stir emotions the Soldier’s never felt before. Steve led him out of HYDRA, brought him to the waters where he was reborn. Steve is his friend, his rescuer, his salvation. Steve made him fail his mission. Steve knows every failure, every indignity of Bucky Barnes, and he holds them against the Soldier now, smirking inside. Steve has him wrapped in strings and he can pull them to make the Soldier move as he pleases. Steve is everything wrong in the world. Steve is—

Steve is beside the Soldier and there is a baseball game on the television. The Soldier watches the players move around the field, analyzing. They would all be easy to kill. The Soldier isn’t supposed to kill anyone anymore. He’s supposed to be free and happy. These objectives are ill-defined.

The Soldier rests his head on Steve’s shoulder and he can sense Steve’s smile without seeing his face. When Steve bares his teeth, it’s like a second source of sunlight, unmistakable. A hand, no bandages, cards softly through the Soldier’s hair. “Baseball games used to go a lot faster,” Steve says.

“I know,” says the Soldier. He doesn’t, but if the Soldier remembers, Steve’s smile is bright enough to burn into the Soldier’s eyes, glowing there even when he turns his head from Steve.

“Once, God, we were so young—we scraped together enough change to go see a Dodgers game, way at the back of the stadium, and I couldn’t see over the seat.”

“You were small and sick all the time.” That, the Soldier does know. He saw the displays at the Smithsonian.

“Yeah.” And there’s Steve’s sad laugh, the laugh that says ‘I wish we’d never left Brooklyn and I wish you hadn’t fallen and become HYDRA’s and ruined everything, you worthless, broken weapon.’ He laughs that way a lot. “Yeah, honey, I did.”

Steve uses the names honey and sweetheart so much that the Soldier originally thought they were call signs, erratically applied. He thought maybe Steve wanted him to be three people when he isn’t even one. Now he understands. They are terms of endearment used to establish camaraderie. When Steve calls him sweetheart or honey—or, more rarely, pumpkin or darling—it is because he wants the Soldier to be those things. Like he thinks calling the Soldier sweet enough words will turn his blood to sugar water, will make him a person again.

It doesn’t make sense. People have a lot of blood; the Soldier knows that.

“We were afraid they’d kick us out if we went to sit on the stairs,” Steve continues. “So you let me sit on your shoulders. Well, you had to drag me up there. I took it as kind of a dig to my pride.”

Then Barnes was an idiot to so disgrace his handler.

The Soldier does not want to think about Barnes. Doing so makes his stomach ache and his teeth grind together. He directs his focus back on the screen, but his gaze drifts to the spectators instead of the players, eyes slipping out of focus as Steve continues to pet his hair. What had been people a moment before is now just a blur of colors.

And then the blur of colors sharpens into bottles of spices. The Soldier is standing in the kitchen, staring into the cupboards. He doesn’t remember getting up, but that’s not unusual. He often finds himself in the bedroom when he had just been at the dinner table, or standing in a shower when he had been asleep in bed. He’s told Steve that weapons are not meant to spend so long awake, but Steve just gave him a smile that looked like tears.

That’s the way Steve smiled when the Soldier came back.

He hadn’t planned to return. Steve wanted Bucky Barnes. The Soldier hated Steve. Hated his soft voice, his sad eyes, his body that had felt so warm and so solid when the Soldier cried on him. He hated that Steve could make him cry.

But Steve had seen his deepest darkest secrets. Steve had proof of his failures written in the Soldier’s own hand. And Steve had still smiled. The Soldier needed a handler, and better one who wouldn’t put out cigarettes on his tongue than one who would.

So he had turned around. Steve found him before he reached the dance studio. Steve had drawn him in close, but not to dance, just to hold. There was blood on Steve’s hand, dripping down the Soldier’s back. Steve was smiling, weeping, saying he wasn’t angry.

Of course he wasn’t angry. The Soldier helped him get free.

Standing before the spices, the Soldier’s stomach growls. He doesn’t eat much; the foods in HYDRA were liquids and now the things on the plates all look like either mutilated corpses or poison. He isn’t sure what poison looks like, but he knows when it’s there. On the rare occasions that anything looks safe for consumption, he often starts a meal and then finds himself somewhere else.

The third time that happened, he ended up sitting on the bed in the apartment Stark made for Steve, staring blindly out the windows. That’s where Steve had found him; the Soldier thinks the voice in the walls that they say is not Zola told him the Soldier’s location. He thinks that’s why they came here instead of to the place in DC where the Soldier gave Steve a birthday card: so he could be watched always.

HYDRA did that too, but they never bothered to hide their surveillance from him.

“Hey sweetheart,” Steve had said, settling onto the bedspread beside him. “Watching the sunset?”

He was now. The sky looked like a painting, filled with shades of pink and gold. “Once I had a mission who was an artist,” he said. “But something else too, something that made her a threat. She had this canvas set up in her office.” It had used pink and gold too. It had been beautiful. “But I got blood all over it.”

Steve’s hand without the bandages had found Bucky’s metal hand and squeezed. “You never have to hurt anyone again, Buck.”

The Soldier wasn’t sure why that was relevant, his mind busy trying to place the names of the shades of pink in the sky. He squeezed back, maybe too hard because Steve winced. Or maybe Steve had finally realized how repulsive the Soldier was.

“Not hungry?” Steve asked. “I thought you liked the soup.”

The Soldier had liked the soup. It didn’t look or smell like poison and it was clear enough that he knew there would be no danger of dipping his spoon in and raising it back up to find hair or eyes. But then he’d gone away and when he’d come back, he’d been here. There wasn’t soup here, which was a shame, because the soup had been good, but now it was probably cold. “I forgot.”

“Bucky.” Steve spoke so softly, as if his words could shatter the Soldier. His hand left the Soldier’s, settling across his shoulders instead and feeling, the Soldier knew, his bones through his clothing. Assessing his weakness. The Soldier was hot, burning with hatred, compelled to smash the window and drive the glass into Steve’s lying eyes and mouth again and again, into his searching hands, to show him just how weak the Soldier was.

But then Steve spoke again, and the Soldier realized he hadn’t broken the window. He hadn’t moved from the bed. “You don’t have to do anything if you don’t feel up to it. But I think it might help you to talk to a doctor. Would you want to?”

The Soldier remembered doctors. He remembered their sharp tools and their burning chair. What little soup he’d eaten rose in his throat. But Steve saved him. Steve was a handler. Steve was his friend despite all the Soldier’s failures and the Soldier could not disappoint him. “Okay.”

The smile he gave Steve tasted like bile and adrenaline. Steve looked so pleased, almost surprised. “Really? Okay. Okay, that’s great, sweetheart. Thank you. Do you want to finish dinner?”

The Soldier nodded, staring at the floor, analyzing. Why had Steve looked taken aback? Was this a test? Had he failed? “Can I have a minute?”

“Sure thing.” Steve was still smiling when he stood up. “I’ll go heat your soup back up, okay?”

The Soldier waited for Steve to leave and quietly vomited in the bathroom. It didn’t look like soup coming back up, but like disappointment. Judgment. He flushed the toilet and went back to the kitchen.

In the kitchen now, the Soldier is still staring at the spices. Sandwiched behind them is a plastic bottle in the shape of a bear. There’s a viscous, golden liquid within. Honey.

Honey. Sweet and syrupy and slow, like Steve wants him to be.

The Soldier finds his hand darting out, grabbing the honey, not caring about the other bottles he knocks from the shelf in his wake. He tears back the cap with enough force to rip it from the bottle, tilting his head back and squeezing the honey into his mouth. It’s heavy, cloying. When he tries to swallow, it seems to stick his throat together, and there’s still more sliding down the back of his tongue, drowning him. He gags, letting the bottle fall to the floor. The Soldier rushes to the sink, retching up honey and acid. He hates honey. He doesn’t want to be anything like it.

Maybe if he drinks acid, he’ll be himself again, deadly and whole. Stark has acids in his lab, but the Soldier’s not allowed into it.

 **SERGEANT BARNES,** says the voice that is not Zola.

The Soldier has the faucet on, his mouth below it to rinse out the terrible, lingering taste. He sputters, coming back up. “What?”

 **CAPTAIN ROGERS IS LOOKING FOR YOU,** Not-Zola replies. **SHALL I GIVE HIM YOUR LOCATION?**

“No,” the Soldier snaps, wiping his mouth. Water and honey darken his sleeve. “I’ll find him myself.”

He can’t remember if he shut off the water before he left the kitchen. It doesn’t matter. Not-Zola can probably control the faucets like he controls everything else.

When he finds Steve in the hall, Steve gives him the sort of smile that people give their dying relatives. The Soldier knows that look because once he had a target in a hospice, one who wasn’t dying fast enough to ensure he couldn’t reveal important secrets. “Hey, Bucky. The seventh inning stretch is over. You took a little long.”

The Soldier wants to pluck out Steve’s eyes so they can no longer look at him with worry and pity. So he can see the disgust surely hidden behind them. “One of the handlers kept a baseball bat in the van,” he says, feeling vicious. “He’d get his flesh fingers crushed under it if he misbehaved.”

Steve’s face falls, which is nice for a second until it hurts. Whatever conditioning Captain America gave to Barnes during the war is still so powerful. “We can watch something else,” Steve says quickly. “Or go for a walk, or—”

 **SIR,** says Not-Zola, as Stark comes stepping out of an elevator. **AGENT COULSON OF S.H.I.E.L.D. IS REQUESTING ENTRY.**

So that’s it, then. HYDRA has returned to regain their property. Steve looks so pale, and the Soldier slips his hand into the bandaged one, holding tight. He wishes he hadn’t talked about the baseball bat. He wishes he could see the bandages off before he goes.

Stark sighs, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Let ‘em in.”

“Tony!”

“He can override JARVIS,” Stark says wearily. “I’ll let him in without a fight. That doesn’t mean I’ll let him waltz out with anything he wants.”

*

“You can’t take Bucky,” Steve says, and the Soldier won’t let his mouth form a frown. Steve shouldn’t call him that in front of potential handlers; it makes him look weak. “He’s innocent.”

Agent Coulson sighs. He looks bored. “Sergeant Barnes has been implicated in the deaths of numerous—”

“He had no choice!” Steve’s flushed, his fists clenched. “And they wouldn’t let him retain memories of the things he did anyway! He can’t give you anything valuable.”

“Our first priority is bringing justice to—”

“Bullshit!” Steve’s standing up now. The Soldier almost reaches out to pull him back down— _ever heard of keeping a level head, you stupid punk?_ —but he will not undermine Steve’s authority in front of this man. The Soldier doesn’t like Agent Coulson. He was smiling when he came in, but the smile was nothing like any of Steve’s. The Soldier couldn’t read it. “There’s no justice in locking up an innocent victim! Why would I trust you to bring justice? S.H.I.E.L.D.’s so rotten, you couldn’t even tell HYDRA had infiltrated you!”

“Neither could you,” says Coulson, and the Soldier imagines how it would feel to crush his throat. Nice, he imagines. Crunchy and a little wet.

Steve only fumes.

“This is only a debriefing, Captain Rogers,” Agent Coulson continues. “If Sergeant Barnes had no choice in his actions, we will not hold him responsible for—”

“I brought down S.H.I.E.L.D. along with HYDRA,” Steve says. “If Fury thinks it makes things any better to just hand the keys over to somebody else, he’s delusional. I have no faith in your justice, Coulson. And I won’t let you take Bucky to some godforsaken cell and let you break him. He’s suffered enough. You want Bucky? You’ve gotta go through me.”

“And my legion of suits,” Stark adds, looking up from his tablet. The Soldier thinks, judging from the noise, that he is playing Pac-Man.

Coulson and Steve both turn to stare at him.

“Sorry, did I run the mood?” Stark asks. “Didn’t mean to get in the way of your standoff.” He’s smiling. The smile looks very familiar.

“Your suits were destroyed, Mr. Stark,” Coulson responds. “You detonated them yourself.”

“Yep.” Stark looks back at the tablet, swiping his fingers over the screen. “But then I nearly got my head blown off by your Insight ships, and near-death experiences really just put me in a tinkering mood. So the gang’s all back in action. Well, most of ‘em.”

“You’re honestly comfortable with Sergeant Barnes remaining in this tower?” Coulson asked. “You, of all people, Mr. Stark, after—”

“Well, let me see.” Stark doesn’t look back up. “It’s either the shadowy government agency that used my tech on the engines of their mass murder machines—that you totally intended to use, just on different people than HYDRA—or the guy whose best friend destroyed those machines before they could kill twenty million people. With, need I remind you, the aid of my tech. I know who’s side I’m on.”

Coulson frowns, standing. “This could have been simple—”

“No, it couldn’t,” says Steve. “And it won’t be. Goodbye, Coulson. And I suggest you find yourself a new scapegoat.”

“We will be debriefing Sergeant Barnes with or without your cooperation.”

“I’m not going with you,” the Soldier says. He hadn’t planned to speak, but the words come heaving out just as the honey had. “Steve’s my handler now. Not you.”

He can tell from all their faces that he should have stayed silent.

*

“Hey Bucky,” Steve says. It’s the afternoon. The Soldier knows this because _The Young and the Restless_ is on. He has become very invested in the lives of the people onscreen since yesterday. He has concluded that Victor is up to no good. He is almost sure which one Victor is.

“You’re blocking the screen,” says the Soldier.

Steve steps to the side. “Do you remember when we talked about a doctor?” he asks.

The Soldier is no longer watching Lauren’s very dramatic telephone call onscreen. His stomach clenches. “Are we going to the lab?”

“No, honey. We can stay right here. Or anywhere you’d feel safe.”

Here? This is not a sterile environment. But maybe that means they will not be performing surgery. The Soldier doesn’t like surgeries. The pain is not so exceptional, but he hates to be strapped down. “Will you be here?”

Steve smiles. “If you want me to be.”

The Soldier will probably not hold Steve’s hand during any procedures. He’d squeeze too tight and bones and veins would come bursting through the skin. That would be rude.

But maybe he can pull on Steve’s bandages. That might help.

“Where are they?”

“There’s only one. He’s a friend of mine.” Steve scratches behind his ear. “You’ve...kind of met him before.”

Steve’s friend is named Sam. He doesn’t look like a doctor; he lacks a coat or gloves. He used to have wings, but the Soldier broke them. He does not move as though he is hindering by the lack of them. No limp, no guarding of his back where they were ripped free.

“Hey Bucky.” Sam offers his hand. “Remember me?”

“You’re still alive,” says the Soldier.

Sam grimaces, but he tries to make it look like a smile. “Yeah. Don’t worry about that, all right? Water under the bridge.”

“I’m sorry about your wings,” the Soldier says, because he is. They looked nice and he couldn’t see a lot of them because he was busy trying to kill Sam and Steve. He would have liked to see more of them, but he tore one right off. Even if it’s still around somewhere, it won’t be nearly as interesting now that it’s not attached.

“Thanks. Really, it’s okay. No harm, no foul.”

The Soldier stares at him. “But I tore one off.”

Sam makes a soft “ah” type of sound. “They’re not attached to me, man. It’s fine.”

Not attached. How foolish. No weapon or escape route always there when he needs it. No strong metal always on hand to protect the flesh. No aching scar tissue where the prosthetic joins on, no pain in his back from the weight of it, no surgeries to make the bones around it more able to take the strain. The Soldier thinks he may hate Sam.

But Steve likes Sam and the Soldier likes Steve. Steve calls him things like “honey” and “sweetheart” because those are the things he wants the Soldier to be. It would not be sweet to insult his handler’s friend, so the Soldier holds his tongue. He waits for the examination to start.

It never does.

Sam settles onto the couch beside the Soldier, and he does not even touch him. Instead, he asks questions. The Soldier glances at Steve to determine whether or not it is appropriate to answer, and Steve nods, so the Soldier takes that as permission to speak. When he does talk, no one slaps him. No one grabs his hair or burns his tongue. There are some questions he won’t answer—Sam is tricky that way, asking questions about Steve or the tower or Brooklyn, and then moving to HYDRA when he thinks the Soldier’s guard is down—but even his refusal does not result in beatings or knives slipped under his nails. He simply says “Classified,” and Steve will open his mouth, but Sam only nods and takes the conversation a different way.

If it is an interrogation, it is a poor one. If it is an examination, it is altogether a failure. But as the time passes, the Soldier forgets to analyze the man’s performance. He becomes caught up in the words; even when he’s not listening so closely to the questions, there’s a pleasant cadence to Sam’s—and occasionally Steve’s—voice. No one in HYDRA ever just spoke to him unless it was to give orders or tell him what a failure he was, what a worthless disappointment, couldn’t even handle one simple assignment, you don’t even have to load your own fucking guns you worthless little idiot I thought you were more than just a pretty face but at least you still have that—

“I don’t want to talk anymore,” the Soldier says loudly. He does not draw his feet up on the couch and he does not leave the room. He is too busy remembering hanging from a ceiling, hurting, with no friend there to give him a knife. He doesn’t like the remembering and he doesn’t like any conversation or any person who can make him remember.

“All right,” says Sam, and the Soldier’s hand is probably not actually around his throat because Sam speaks too clearly for that. “That’s fine, Bucky. Thanks for talking to me.”

The Soldier doesn’t speak. He stares at the floor, not wanting the feelings in their eyes to worm into his mind and force his mouth back open. Steve is starting to say something when Stark comes into the room.

“Staying for dinner?” he asks Sam. “I had a chef flown in from Florence for the evening.”

The Soldier cannot see Sam’s reaction. He is looking at Stark in the doorway. Stark is smiling. It looks familiar.

“You couldn’t get someone in the US to make spaghetti?” Sam asks.

“Have you ever been to Italy?” Stark responds.

“Bucky and I have,” Steve says. “Do you remember, Buck?”

The Soldier is still staring, and then he remembers.

_He made funny faces too, when I shot him._

Howard Stark.

“Bucky?”

The Soldier only frowns.

*

Every heavy object in the Soldier’s bedroom has been bolted down. The bed frame, the desk, the dresser. And the drawers cannot be fully removed from either the desk or the dresser; the Soldier tried that on his first day while Steve stood in the doorway and frowned, mouthing words the Soldier did not hear because he was busy cataloguing his resources. There were not many.

His bedroom is in Steve’s floor of the tower and everything, even the things not in the Soldier’s room, is bolted down. The Soldier imagines that’s because of him, but maybe not. It would be stupid to bolt everything down in _Steve’s_ space because of him. What if Steve needs to block an attacker? What if he needs the Soldier to protect him?

It’s stupid. Stark is stupid and the Soldier is happy that he will succeed at eliminating him this time around. It’s one thing to fail at eliminating Steve because Steve is his new handler now and was likely a handler in the time before the Soldier can remember, before ice and metal and electricity. But Stark is not a handler and the Soldier is disgracing HYDRA and Steve and probably America by letting him live for as long as he has. That must be why there have been no new missions. Steve is waiting for him to finish a job that he should have finished a very long time ago. And now he will.

It is night. Steve has already come into the Soldier’s bedroom, as he does every night, to assure the Soldier that he is safe and protected and no one will break through the windows or doors in the night and take him back to cryostasis, because Steve is here and Steve is watching, Steve’s saved him twice before and will save him again. This is very different than the procedures HYDRA employed before they put the Soldier to sleep, but then, he does not sleep nearly as long here as he would with HYDRA. Tonight he does not sleep at all. He walks into the attached bathroom and stands before the sink. He bends down.

There is metal piping below the basin. Stark checked the Soldier’s arm for tracking devices when he first arrived at the tower. It is possible that he discovered a kill switch, or inserted one himself. But if the Soldier can pull free the piping and carry that in his flesh hand, then he can bludgeon Stark’s brain in with or without the use of the left arm.

He closes the left hand around the u-bend, tugging. There is a shrill sound as the metal begins to wrench free, but Stark is in the penthouse suite. He cannot hear that from here. The Soldier thinks that Not-Zola is speaking, but he cannot hear it over the squealing pipes. He twists his wrists, and the pipe pulls free, a little water and hair trickling out. It smells fetid.

 **SERGEANT BARNES?** Not-Zola asks.

The Soldier starts for the elevator, moving the pipe to his flesh hand. There is a woman who shares the penthouse with Stark and the Soldier cannot remember her name. Is it Maria? Maria Stark was listed as acceptable collateral in the dossier. If this woman is not Maria, he cannot dispose of her without further instruction from Steve. He will settle for knocking her unconscious. The Soldier knows many ways to do that without inflicting brain damage, ways that probably aren’t even painful, that won’t leave the woman lying back, screaming as lightning arcs across her eyes and mind, the scent of singed hair all around—

The elevator will not open.

Of course. Not-Zola controls the elevators as he controls all electronics within the building. The Soldier nearly slams the pipe into his own head. No doubt the computer will have warned Stark. He spins around. The stairs. He must reach the penthouse before Stark reaches his suits. Time is of the essence.

But Steve is standing in the way.

His hair is mussed, sticking up at odd angles. His clothes are rumpled and the Soldier imagines he’s just woken up. In a bed, not in ice. They both slept in ice and sometimes the Soldier wonders if Steve wasn’t another fist of HYDRA who wasn’t stored properly and so woke up in the wrong place. Steve’s eyes are wide awake. He looks as he did hanging from the beam in the ballet studio: so very cautious.

“Hey Bucky,” he says. “JARVIS was worried about you. What’s up?”

The Soldier’s face burns bright. Steve is his handler and Steve is watching the Soldier fail as a result of poor planning. Steve will replace him and laugh at him and the Soldier’s hand feels cold and slick against the pipe, trembling. Maybe he’ll hit Steve with it before Stark. Smash his jaw so he cannot laugh at the Soldier. “I’m fulfilling the mission.”

“Okay.” Steve speaks slowly. He may have been sleeping, but now he’s fully alert, subtly guarding as though he expects an attack. “What mission is that, sweetheart?”

It’s not enough to watch him fail; Steve must also make him voice his shame. The Soldier feels acid in his throat and does not believe it is from the tomato sauce at dinner. He’s not sure if he ate at dinner, or if that was even today. “Eliminating Howard Stark.”

“Bucky.” Steve is still upright, still guarded, but his whole body seems to crumple back to ninety pounds of chronic illness. The Soldier glances at the bookshelf behind him, trying to create a scale by which to measure if Steve has physically diminished or not. “Bucky, honey. Howard’s dead. We’re staying with his son, remember? Tony. His name is Tony. He told us that when we came here. Remember?”

The Soldier frowns.

“He’s Howard’s son,” Steve repeats. “They look similar because they’re related, but that’s it. They’re different people.”

“I don’t like failing,” says the Soldier.

“You’re not failing.” Steve walks to him then, pulling the Soldier in close. And now it’s the Soldier shrinking back. He twists in the hug, trying to see his shoulder, to make sure the metal arm isn’t falling off what with how small he feels, but Steve tightens his grip. “That mission’s long over, Bucky. And you should never have been forced to do it to begin with. There aren’t missions here, all right? Sam’s going to recommend us some specialists to help you. We’re going to _help_ you, honey. We want you to get better. No one’s going to treat you like a thing, a tool. Never again.”

The Soldier squirms again. He needs a mission he must have a mission without a mission everything will become erratic and Steve will put him down with a shot between the eyes like a rabid dog. “I need a mission to function.”

“It’s not like that anymore,” Steve whispers, resting his forehead on the Soldier’s shoulder. He sounds so tired.

“I _need_ a mission to function,” the Soldier repeats, voice breaking.

Steve sighs. It’s a sigh that comes all the way up from his feet. He straightens, giving the Soldier a smile that looks like crying. “Your mission is to get better,” he says. “That’s what you need to focus on now. And everyone here will help you with that. Pepper, Tony, JARVIS—we’ll all help you.”

It is a bad mission, the Soldier thinks, but more worrying is the look on Steve’s face. As if he is a broken vase stacked back together but not glued, and one wrong move will topple him.

“Here,” Steve says. “Why don’t you share my bed tonight, sweetheart? Or I could sleep in your room. You’re confused. You shouldn’t be alone when you’re this stressed, Buck.”

“His last handlers said that dogs sleep on the floor,” the Soldier answers.

He can see the vase collapse, but Steve just keeps on smiling, letting the Soldier hold the bandaged hand, and puts him to bed.


End file.
